John R. Miles

Yeah, it's a person who's in a family ecosystem where if you think about this as the analogy of a house, all of a sudden they become the floor that everyone is stopping on or they become the refrigerator that's out in the garage.

Serves a purpose, but doesn't really get any constant love and caring, right?

So I think one of the things that goes on in society is so many smart, capable people stay in bad deals for a very long time, whether that's at work or at home, as you were just describing.

What do you think are some of the early warning signs that one of those deals or life arrangement is costing you more than it's giving you?

In your book, Having It All, frame all of this, that life is a set of exchanges of time, money, energy, effort for a perceived payoff.

So if we go back to what we were talking about with personal utility, and you think about the deals we were just talking about,

How would us knowing our utility function shift or guide the big decisions or deals that we're making in our career relationships, et cetera?

How would it make things different?

You probably didn't know this, but I spent a number of years at Booze & Co.

I know that McKinsey world.

And I would always look at the partners thinking some of them had been there 20, 25 years.

I was like, how in the world do you do this?

Corinne, one of the things you talk about in the book is something that you identify as the squeeze.

And to me, this squeeze was something that I think my parents had warned me about, but

I didn't really have a terminology for it until I found myself in it.

But maybe you could describe for the audience what the squeeze is and how they might understand if they're living in it now or if they've already gone through it.

To summarize, what your research shows in the book is that home demands peak before income does.

And so that intensifies the strain of the squeeze that people are feeling.

So my question to that is, it seems like the squeeze is lasting for many people and longer, regardless if they have the kids who are growing up or not.

Have you seen that as well?